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Open Science at MozFest 2015

Posted on November 11th, 2015 in Events

Mozilla Festival 2015

Mozilla’s annual, hands-on festival (affectionately known as MozFest), brought together 1.7k+ attendees from more than 50 countries, to participate in 343 workshop sessions exploring topics such as open data, privacy, ethics, literacy and economy on the Web.

“MozFest is an annual celebration of the world’s most valuable public resource: the open Web. Participants are diverse — there are engineers and artists, activists and educators. But everyone shares a common belief: the Web can make lives better. The Web unlocks opportunity, spurs creativity, teaches valuable skills and connects far-flung people and ideas.” –Mark Surman, Mozilla Foundation (https://2015.mozillafestival.org/expect)

Open Science at MozFest

Our colleagues at the Citizen Cyberlab also took part, with one session that was core to the project ”GeoTag-X Learn about CCL’s pilot project for crowdsourcing data analysis in humanitarian disasters”; one session that came out of the CERN Webfest – “YA3C : Yet another 3D Controller Find out about YA3C—a controller lets you use your mobile to control 3D models on a lecture screen”, and one session that was run by the Citizen Cyberscience Centre - “Open Seventeen Open Seventeen uses crowdsourcing and open data for verification by the public that governments and companies are contributing to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals”,

An Open IoT Stack for Schools

In our session, we built an IoT stack for schools together with fellow MozFest attendees interested in hands-on learning.

The Internet of Things provides a fantastic opportunity for school children to acquire STEM skills while learning more about their immediate environment as well. But there are a lot of IoT tools out there—so many, in fact, that it’s hard to know where to start.

In this workshop we looked at how to assemble an IoT stack for schools. This includes everything from hardware, and calibration, to data aggregation and coding tools. The idea of this workshop was to share our knowledge with one another about tools and especially about gaps in the tool chain, from the point of view of parents, teachers and students. Participants got hands-on experience of an IoT stack, with hardware provided by us.